


Amy and Jake Forever

by mockingejay



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, Celeste and Jesse Forever AU, F/M, Little to no happiness, anyway idk how to tag things but have fun, bc this ripped my heart out writing it, but i'm kinda sorry, hello naughty children it's murder time, i'm not really that's a lie, i'm sorry in advance, it kind of has a happy ending i guess but not the one anybody wants, it's exactly as painful as u think it's gonna be, like really sorry, so have fun reading it, that was the working title tbh, this fic may also be referred to as The Hellfic, this is just bucketfuls of angst, yep u read that right
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 02:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12122553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockingejay/pseuds/mockingejay
Summary: Amy, and Jake, and the happy ending that's only the beginning of the story.(Or, the Celeste and Jesse Forever AU.)





	Amy and Jake Forever

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO FRIENDS AND WELCOME TO THE SUFFERING.
> 
> This story has been running around in my head (and in many, many Google Docs) for the past six months. The Hell Movie messed me up in ways I can't explain, to the point where it stuck in my head and refused to grant me any reprieve until I did something with it - so here we are!
> 
> An important introductory note: my brain works in a strange way that necessitates the assigning of a song to each chapter. Each chapter title is comprised of lyrics from the respective songs, but I'll probably chuck in a more specific reference in the notes of every chapter. For chapter one: St Jude by Florence + The Machine.
> 
> I'm a terrible person so I make no promises about how regularly updates will be posted, but I am very very connected to this fic and I have a lot of the later sections already somewhat written. So it may take another six months, but I shall soldier on! 
> 
> In the meantime - welcome to the inner workings of a relationship breakdown. I hope I do it justice.

“I never thought I’d say this, but things are actually kinda boring without you, Santiago.”

Gina’s voice is just on the loud side of appropriate Friday night enthusiasm, but Amy appreciates the sentiment. It’s been too long since she’s sat surrounded on all sides by her friends, and she wonders why she hasn’t put more effort into keeping up her appearances at Shaw’s.

“Gina’s right, Amy,” Charles agrees. “We really need to do this more often. It isn’t the same when you’re not here.”

Jake nods vehemently at her side. “We miss you, babe.” _I miss you._ Overcome by a sudden wave of nostalgia, she stirs the watery remains of her vodka soda. Jake slips his arm around her waist and she leans against him on instinct.

“When are you two dumb-dumbs gonna learn how to line up your nights off?” Rosa chimes in with all of her usual abruptness, and she feels the thrum of Jake’s responding chuckle vibrate against her shoulder. He’s always getting called in for extra night shifts, or sticking around at the precinct for overtime, and if she’s being honest she feels a little out of place being at the bar without him.

“I mean,” she laughs, spurred on by the fifth drink working its way through her system, “it would be way easier if Jake was a sergeant, but that’s not going to happen." 

She feels Jake tense beside her, and the white noise of the bar comes to a screeching halt. Her statement came out a lot more biting than she intended, with a _lot_ more venom dripping from her words than she could have imagined. Charles looks down into his third whiskey sour, shifting uncomfortably. Rosa takes one sidelong glance at Jake and makes her exit, making a beeline for the bar and another shot of tequila.

“Well, this is awkward,” says Gina from where she sits next to Charles. Amy glares in her direction, silently cursing the mouth now hidden behind the rim of a dizzyingly bright pink cocktail. Jake clears his throat, only adding to the uncomfortable atmosphere surrounding the four of them, and Amy is painfully aware of the heat rising in her cheeks. In the past ten seconds it feels like all the alcohol has left her system, and she’s suddenly stone cold sober and full of bitter regret as Jake drains the last of his beer and stands up to leave.

The background noise of Shaw’s comes rushing back in an overwhelming cacophony and Amy’s mind snaps back into focus. She slides halfway out of the booth before realising she’s leaving without saying goodbye.

“I have to…” she starts by way of excusing herself, not really knowing where the sentence is going, but Gina cuts her off. She’s glaring at Amy now, staring her down with a look in her eyes that’s both knowing and cautionary.

“Yeah,” Gina says sharply, “you do.”

Then she blinks and the dim lighting of the bar is long gone, replaced by the almost uncomfortably warm interior of the car. Suddenly the weight of unwelcome realisation hits her like a train, and she can see from the way he refuses to look at her that he feels it too. She’s trying to be patient with him, they both know it, but they both know that he sees her when she thinks he isn’t looking. No matter how much she tries to hide the discomfort and the frustration that flash across her face when he’s just a little too immature, it’s a lingering thought in the back of her mind - and his - that she never used to look at him like that.

And there are so many things she wants to say, so much she has to tell him, like _it’s not your fault_ or _I’m trying,_ but her nerve gets lost in the silence. She glances in his direction and finds him, jaw clenched and white-knuckled from his grip on the steering wheel, with the chasm of quiet between them making it feel like all the air has been sucked out of the confines of the car.

"Jake," she starts, voice shaking more than her hands. "I'm... Sorry."

She sees his resolve falter briefly, watches him itching to reach out for her, yearning to reach over the console and close this distance between them, before he catches himself and just stares straight ahead.

She really needs a cigarette.

“You know I didn’t mean -”

"Amy," he says, and there's a harshness to his voice that she isn't used to. He seems to grapple with himself for a moment, debating what to say next. She looks over again just in time to see his expression soften. "You know I love you, right?"

All of a sudden the bottom hemline of her shirt becomes very interesting. "I know," she says, surprised at the guilt colouring her tone. "I know," she repeats, softer this time, more resigned than anything. She wants to reach out for him, wants to run her fingers over the harsh set of his jaw so he'll _relax._ "I love you too. And I'm _sorry_ -"

"Please," he cuts her off. "Ames, please. Can we not do this tonight?" There's something like grief twisting the bottom of his words, like there's pain somewhere deep inside him. It breaks something open in her own chest, knowing she's the one that caused it. Knowing there's nothing she can do.

"Jake, honey..." 

He levels her with a look, the flashing lights of passing cars illuminating his dark eyes.

"Okay," she concedes, giving in with a sad little nod. "Okay."

She reaches for him finally, tracing the line of his jaw with gentle fingers, and a spark of hope ignites in her chest when she feels the tension starting to ease out of him. She tells him _I love you so much_ in earnest, feels relief washing over her in waves when he turns his head to press a tiny kiss to her fingertips. "Love you too, Ames."

She lets her hand drop down, a tiny smile spreading across her face when he laces his fingers with hers. She presses a kiss to their intertwined fingers and leans her head on the cool glass of the window, drifting off into an oblivion of flashing lights as they get closer and closer to Brooklyn.

About a half hour later they’re lying in bed and Jake finds himself subconsciously reaching for her hand.

(He has a dim memory of being six years old and overhearing his mother trying desperately to talk her way out of another fight. “Maybe we should - maybe we should try something the counselor said,” he remembers hearing, in the high pitched tone his mother’s voice only took on in times of desperation. “She said something about holding hands, remember? How we were less likely to fight if we were holding hands?” 

Jake doesn’t remember his father’s reply, only remembers that twelve months later the house suddenly felt empty, and his mother insisted on holding his hand everywhere they went until he started middle school and wanted to walk by himself.)

It’s kind of an unspoken rule they have, him and Amy. They both like to avoid talking about its origins - given than it was, more likely than not, born out of years of abrupt, gut-wrenching absences - but somewhere along the line, somewhere in the space between partnership and friendship and romance and marriage they developed a tradition of - well, holding hands. They’ve had their fair share of unjust separations over the years, and after what they now refer to exclusively as ‘The Hawkins Incident’ it became increasingly apparent to them that they couldn’t afford to spend time being angry.

They fought, certainly. But when your job entails getting shot at on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis, you learn to prioritise. Over the years they developed a kind of system, so formulaic in nature that Jake is surprised he even manages to follow it most of the time. Their fights always start as bickering. They’d roll their eyes and let the tension build until one of them broke and the yelling started. They’d kick and scream and cry and at the end of it all, even if the anger was still simmering inside them, they’d crawl into bed and reach for each other’s hands and say _I love you._ They’d be okay.

Nine times out of ten he wakes up in the middle of the night to find her breathing softly against his neck, her arm thrown across his middle. It still does something strange and fluttery to his insides, the way she curls into him unconsciously. He’ll run his fingers softly, softly through her hair, not wanting to wake her and disrupt the stillness. He’ll drift off to the sound of her breathing and wake the next morning to kisses along his collarbone and whisper after whisper, _I love you I love you I love you_ , pressed against his skin.

But now - now is unsettling because there’s nothing noticeably _different_ about tonight. Their entwined hands are resting on the soft cotton of their white sheets, and despite the argument that ended less than half an hour ago, it still feels like forgiveness. The clock on Amy’s side of the bed ticks out a reassuring rhythm that’s overloud in the silence of their bedroom, and Jake wonders why everything feels so _wrong._

Maybe, he thinks, ugly thoughts filling up all the empty space in between the incessant ticking, maybe it was all just a matter of time.

* * *

 

Jake was never in her life calendar.

Granted, somewhere around 2020 she had allowed for _Marriage/Children,_ but he couldn’t even comply with that - they got married two years early, and he’s been throwing her life into chaos ever since.

Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing - she also made Lieutenant three years earlier than she anticipated - but being with Jake Peralta comes with a very specific set of complications. For example: even after her post-Jake adjustments, she could never have allowed for the potential of a fifteen year separation. So, it’s not a bad thing, but everything about him is just… spontaneous. Unpredictable. Sometimes irresponsible. Soon enough she realises that it’s impossible to plan anything when it comes to Jake, and she takes a liking to his tendency towards improvisation.

But, no matter how much she tries to ignore it, she doesn’t _like_ the lack of predictability. It’s unsettling. It goes against the very fibre of her obsessive-compulsive being. Undeniably, though, Jake is rubbing off on her. And, in a similar vein of undeniability, she’s having an impact on him. He makes his own contributions to their shared life calendar, and she once found a half-assembled binder of plans for their Paris itinerary - the pang of guilt she feels at her discovery is only temporary.

(She still catches herself making the occasional flowchart or spreadsheet, but it’s nowhere near the neuroses of her old planning schedule. She’s not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.)

Jake, on the other hand, has only made two (important, legitimate, non-competitive) plans during his entire relationship with Amy.

The first he made during his three and a half month stint in prison: he already had the ring, and he was going to make some grand romantic gesture as soon as he got out of that cell. In the end, that plan went out the window - it was already past midnight by the time they walked into their apartment the day (night? morning?) he got out of prison. He walked straight to the closet and tugged his leather jacket off its hanger, pulling the little velvet box out of its hiding place in his pocket. He proposed at one in the morning, delirious and sleep deprived and so desperate he doesn’t even remember what he said. He just remembers the shock on her face, pale and exhausted but so undeniably happy, and the way she got down on the floor with him and pulled him in close and cried, _yes yes yes,_ over and over again into his shoulder.

The second plan he likes to think of as the big romantic gesture he never got to make during his proposal. Before the shitshow that was the Hawkins debacle, they plan - discuss, really - their Paris trip. After the engagement they decide it makes more sense for that to be their honeymoon destination, but between working cases and planning a wedding they never really get around to booking tickets. It’s okay, they think. They’re planning for something of a delayed honeymoon anyway.

The wedding is perfect. Holt officiates, Nikolaj is the ring bearer, Terry’s girls throw flowers all down the aisle. Charles, to nobody’s surprise, cries all through his best man’s speech. Neither of them will ever admit it, but Rosa and Gina clutch at each other’s hands through the whole ceremony to keep from any uncivilised outbursts of emotion. Jake cries - openly - at the sight of Amy in that white dress. She’s _perfect_. All of it is perfect, and the next week at work Holt approves their time off. They plan to book tickets to Paris the following week.

But, of course, the universe has other plans.

The Michaelson case lasts for three months and throws the whole squad into a whirlwind of overnights at the precinct. Jake and Amy barely see each other. When they do, they’re running on stolen hours of sleep and excessive caffeine, and the high stakes of the case mean tensions are running rampant between every member of their little family. They take the full brunt of the pressure: there are several screaming matches in dark corners of the precinct at all hours of the morning, voices so raw with exhaustion and frustration that they carry through the bullpen. The rest of the squad pretends not to notice, knowing everything will resolve itself once the case ties up. They’re right, and things do get better, but needless to say their trip doesn’t get booked.

Naturally, though, that’s not the end of the disruptions. Less than a month after they close the Michaelson case, Holt tells Amy to take an upcoming Lieutenant’s exam. She does, and passes with flying colours, because of course she does. Her promotion is basically instantaneous, and Jake feels like he’s glowing from the inside out when he sees the look on her face after Holt commends her on her progress.

(They still haven’t booked their trip, and Jake starts to wonder if she still wants to go.)

One night during her second week as lieutenant, Amy walks in the door with complications trailing behind her. Jake hasn’t been at work - he’d just spent almost three straight days at the precinct working a string of violent burglaries with Rosa, and they’d both been given the day off to recover - and he’s spent the day (afternoon, if he’s being pedantic, which he is, apparently, and he supposes that in itself is a testament to the impact Amy has had on him) curled under blankets on the couch watching _Die Hard_ on a loop.

“They want me to transfer.”

He has a lot of questions - _What? Who? Where? Is this going to be like the Major Crimes thing all over again?_ \- but in something of a sleep-deprived, action-movie-induced stupor, his brain only comprehends one word.

“Transfer?" 

“It’s sudden, I know, but that’s a good sign, right? Like, I made a good impression -”

“ _Transfer?”_ He really doesn’t mean for it to come out so - he can’t really think of a word for it - so… “I mean, I’m not surprised, I’m just…”

“Surprised?” She takes a seat on the arm of the couch, smirking down at him. He smiles sheepishly back up at her, and there’s a familiar look in her eyes he can’t quite put his finger on.

_So, a lot of change around here, huh?_

He is surprised, just a little bit. Which isn’t to say he’s not proud of her - he is, really, he’s never been so proud of anyone in his _life_ \- but things start to change, and they both know this is uncharted territory in that this will be the first time since knowing each other that they haven’t been around each other almost 24/7. As much as he hates to admit it, he knows this will complicate things. Amy is progressing, and he’s not. It’s fine. He wasn’t ever interested in being a captain anyway. Like he said to her on the day of her sergeant’s exam, he always knew she was going to be his boss. It doesn’t bother him.

She takes the job.

(That’s when it starts to bother him.)

“I just feel like she’s never around anymore,” he says to Rosa one night, glancing down at where condensation from his half-empty beer is gathering on the tabletop.

“Dude. She’s a lieutenant. She’s got shit to do,” is Rosa’s reply, and he glares in her direction. She rolls her eyes but gives him a sympathetic look.  “Sorry. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, but… Whenever she _is_ around, she just seems so distant. It’s like she’s not there at all.” Rosa hums beside him, taking a long sip from her own beer. She’s not talkative, he knows, and sometimes he’ll come out just to hear that little hum of understanding. It’s like her own way of saying _I hear you. I get it. It sucks._ She seems to be thinking of something to say next - not because she suddenly has some life-changing advice for him, really, it’s more for his sake than her own - but he fills the silence instead; she breathes an infinitesimal side of relief at his side. “It’s just like, I miss her even when she’s right next to me.”

“You gotta tell her that, man. You can’t expect to fix things when she doesn’t even know there’s a problem.”

He sighs, the noise coming from somewhere deep down in his chest, and Rosa punches him lightly on the arm. “Don’t overthink it.” He looks up at her then, pleading with his eyes for her to give him some kind of solution. She raises her beer at him, tilting it in his direction, like she’s using it to prove a point, and continues. “Just get super drunk and tell her how you feel.”

He finally cracks a smile at that, and glances over his shoulder at where Amy is flanked on all sides by their friends, no doubt charming them with a story of her latest drug bust (he’s keeping his distance for a reason - she almost pushed him off the bed when he tried to ask her if it was _cocaîna_ ). She’s glowing in the dim light of the bar, radiant with pride and gesticulating wildly as she recounts the story. The lightbulb somewhere above her head is cheap and dull, but the light glints off her wedding ring - the ring he bought three weeks before the Hawkins incident; the ring he gave her at one in the morning the night he got home from prison; the ring he’s convinced has a little bit of his heart stored in the gemstone so that she can carry it around with her wherever she goes - and he knows Rosa is right.

After all, it’s not like _everything_ has changed. She’s here, at the bar, laughing with the rest of their family. Granted she doesn’t make it every week, but she still comes to Shaw’s with the rest of the squad whenever possible. So there are some things that have stayed largely the same. Surely he can make everything else go back to normal as well. Right?

He goes over and throws his arm around her shoulders, and six-drink Amy curls into him instantly. The familiarity of the whole thing is comforting, he supposes, and he knows that (provided Gina doesn’t supply her with another ridiculous cocktail) she’ll be back to the vivacity and over-confidence of five-drink Amy within the next half hour. But, as is usual when the whole squad is together, achieving sobriety is not at the top of anyone’s to-do list.

Later - several Gina Linetti specials and several subsequent water breaks later - he finds himself with his very drunk, _very_ giggly four-drink wife pressed up against him in the back of a taxi, and he can't help but laugh along with her because, well, he's not feeling too sober himself. “Aaaaames,” he drawls, revelling in the way her head rests on his shoulder and lolls around so she can look up at him with wide, glassy eyes. She gives an encouraging little _mm?_ and smiles up at him, a drunk, dopey kind of smile he's only seen a handful of times, one he can't remember seeing since their wedding night. He's missed it. He's missed her. “I've missed you.”

Her brows furrow in momentary confusion before her grin widens and she pulls him in for a messy kiss. “Don't be an idiot,” she murmurs, unknowingly digging up long-forgotten memories of when she warned him not to do anything stupid in prison. _Please don't be an idiot,_ she says in the back of his mind. _I won't be there to fix things._ “I'm right here.”

But that’s just it, isn't it? She's right there, and he’s missed her. He misses her. And something about that is so fucking ridiculous to him, because they _live_ together, they sleep in the same _bed_ for crying out loud, but he still misses her even when she's right next to him. It's insane. It's - not logical. It doesn't make sense. But it's there, a niggling discomfort at the bottom of his chest. It starts at the bottom of his ribcage and spreads up and out, like spiders crawling up through his sternum and the craziest thing is, he hasn't felt like this since Florida.

Well, after Florida, really. The post-Florida aftermath. Six months of distance did strange things to them, to both of them and the way they existed in each other's worlds.

(Amy used to crack her knuckles when she was nervous. Now, she casually tilts her head from side to side, the resounding _pop_ just as intimidating as he could have imagined.

Jake, on the other hand, wants a break from action movie level badassery. For once he's perfectly content to stay in and _watch_ Die Hard - he doesn't want to live it anymore.)

Somewhere in those six months things had changed between them and neither of them had been there to witness the transition. It was unconscious, in a way; gradual enough that they didn't notice it every day, but big and bold enough that it made their reunion jarring and awkward, because they were returning to a person who wasn't absolutely the same as the one they left behind. That's the point Jake’s drunk mind is trying to comprehend.

She's not the Amy he married. That's why he misses her. 

He's not the Jake she married, either. In the three years since the wedding, things changed. _They_ changed. Which isn't a bad thing, not really, because isn't the point of marriage to grow as a person with your favourite person right there to hold your hand?

(The irony of the whole situation is that even though they've fallen asleep every night for the past three years with their fingers intertwined, he feels like he knows nothing about her.)

He probably wouldn’t miss the old Amy - and he hates that phrase, _the old Amy_ , because it implies that it's the only version of her he loves, which is far, far, far away from the truth - so much if he’d been there to watch her flourish. If she’d let him be there.

That's Amy, though. Fiercely independent, the most driven person he's ever met in his life, always working and growing and changing. Since the day he met her, he's been the biggest supporter of all her advancements, but somehow, somewhere along the line, he's just… Missed them.

He doesn't spend much longer trying to put the pieces together, because in the middle of his crisis Amy has started kissing down his neck, and the cab is almost back at their apartment, and he may have some questions for her in the morning but what better way to reconnect than this?

* * *

 

Amy is asleep beside him and she looks ageless in the half light of the bedroom; in the dim glow of the Brooklyn skyline she could be fifteen, or fifty, or anything at all. It’s only at times like these, when the purple moonlight is dancing across her skin and she’s fast asleep and he’s wide awake, that he wonders if the past twelve years have happened at all.

Which is ridiculous, right? The amount of self-doubt he has about their relationship is borderline crazy, but not unwarranted, he thinks, given the tension between them lately. Anyway, it's _insane._ It's batshit crazy because how is it that now, lying inches away from her in the bed they've shared for almost four years, he feels the same way he did in some unfamiliar arcade after six _months_ of no contact, no communication, no nothing?

( _Communication is the key to any healthy relationship,_ he remembers her reciting from a conflict resolution binder.) Maybe that's it. They don’t talk anymore.

Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s not like Jacob never-shuts-up Peralta is suddenly mute. They talk. About tv shows, about weird shit they see on the subway, about cases (when they can). But - and this is something of a revelation for Jake, because admittedly he does, on occasion, have a somewhat inflated sense of self that warps his perception of how truly important his contributions to conversations are - they’re not talking about anything of substance. Which is to say:

They don’t talk about the nine-nine.

Maybe it’s his fault things are fizzling. He _chooses_ not to tell her about Charles’ latest culinary mishaps. He _chooses_ not to tell her about the time Hitchcock caught Rosa and Gina making out in the break room during their lunch break. He _chooses_ not to tell her about how many times, daily, he glances up to look across his desk and meet her eye, only to find some freshly promoted detective staring back at him across the stretch of scuffed metal.

And… well. Some days are worse than others. He’s spent a good few lunch breaks having private freak outs in Babylon after especially gruesome cases. He wants so badly just to _talk to her,_ but their days off very rarely line up and by the time they both get home at night they're too exhausted to do anything but climb into bed. So he chooses not to try (and he _realises_ the self-destructiveness of it all, yes, it's not like Amy has taught him nothing), almost afraid of the consequences of catching her on a bad day and unintentionally starting yet another unnecessary argument. Part of him is surprised she hasn't picked up on anything yet. He’s not angry, not really - he's sure she has her fair share of panic attacks in the evidence lockup at her new precinct. But he comes home every day and he can’t look her in the eye, and she doesn’t seem to notice.

The rest of the squad knew something was wrong when Amy stopped coming to Shaw’s every week. Gina was the first to notice, primarily because she no longer had anyone to throw toothpicks at from the other end of the bartop. Jake regularly finds himself sitting next to her, letting silent tears drip onto the dingy wooden table more habitually than he’d like to admit. He lets beer after beer loosen his tongue, lets the thoughts come pouring out of him faster than the bartender can pour him another drink, and he mopes and sighs and hangs his head about how much he misses Amy, about how he just wants to _talk to her -_

“You’re drunk, Pineapples.”

Gina’s voice cuts through his internal monologue, and he shakes his head a little to clear the fog of alcohol clouding his thoughts.

“No, I’m - I mean, I know, but listen -”

“Babe, you gotta go home.”

Jake lets his upper body flop down to rest on the tabletop. “Don’t wanna go home,” he murmurs, voice muffled where his lips are crushed against the sleeve of his hoodie. He lets out a long, heavy sigh, and Gina watches as the fight drains out of him with each exhale. “She’s happier without me there anyway.”

“ _Nope,_ ” she says, so loudly she actually turns a few heads. “No, nope, nuh-uh. We are _not_ having a little pity party, Jacob.” He raises his head a little at that, just enough to glare at her without sitting fully upright. He opens his mouth to speak, but she holds up one authoritative finger and proceeds without taking a breath. “Santiago loves you. She may have terrible fashion sense and a penchant for annoying me without even looking in my direction, but she’s not an idiot. She wouldn’t have married you if she didn’t love you.”

“My dad married my mom,” he says bitterly, finally hauling himself upright again. He recoils immediately - but not quickly enough - when Gina reaches forward to grab him by the chin, pulling his face in close to hers.

 _“Jake._ You _know_ Amy loves you, and you _know_ you’re nothing like that piece of shit who calls himself your dad. You wanna know why you’re in a rough patch with Santiago? You’ve been staying late at the precinct for three weeks straight. You haven’t even seen her. So stop _avoiding_ her, go home, and see your goddamn wife if you want things to get better.”

When she lets go of his face he defiantly clenches his jaw, ready to retort, but Gina raises her eyebrows at him and he lets out a morose sigh instead. “Thanks, Goose.”

“You know I’m right,” she says, in what he thinks is meant to be a comforting manner. He nods in response, giving her a tiny smile that doesn’t reach his eyes before he kisses her on the forehead.

He sees himself out, intent on wallowing in his anguish for just a while longer, rounding the corner into the alleyway beside the bar and leaning against the cool bricks. The rough wall is steadying and sobering against his back, grounding him and reminding him of a calm he hasn’t felt in a very long time. He watches as a cloud of smoke from a stranger’s cigarette momentarily glows in the haze of light from the neon sign outside the bar. In some bizarre, abstract way it makes him think of Amy, and he begrudgingly accepts that Gina may actually be right.

* * *

 

Jake gets home just before 2am after a solid week of not seeing Amy. She’d made a quick lunchtime stopover that day to drop off a case file, but other than that he’d barely seen her for longer than ten minutes at a time: a red ball at the nine-nine had led to a string of very late nights for the majority of the squad, with Jake putting in a considerable number of overtime hours to crack it sooner. He's exhausted. But more than anything, he misses his wife, and there's nothing in the entire world he wants more than to crawl into bed and be with her.

He strips down to his boxers, not bothering with pyjamas - the air conditioning in their apartment is a little less than brilliant anyway, and he needs to feel her skin _right now_ to assure himself that he, that she, that _they_ actually exist. Through his drunken haze of sleep deprivation something about her is magnetic, despite everything, and he presses himself up against her as soon as his body hits the mattress, throwing an arm across her waist.

“Babe?” Her voice is heavy and low in the darkness of the bedroom, sleep tugging at her words. “You're home.”

His heart stutters a little - it's probably just past 2am, and she's almost always asleep when he gets home. He's pleasantly surprised. She shifts a little in his arms, the fabric of her - _his -_ old NYPD t-shirt slipping down to reveal the hollow of her throat. “Mm,” he hums into the just-almost-exposed skin of her shoulder. “It's over.”

“Thank god,” she sighs, exhaustion and compassion and raw relief all mingling in her voice. “I missed you.”

He smiles into her skin, unable to resist the temptation of teasing her, sleepiness be damned. “You saw me like twelve hours ago.”

She giggles in response, thin and a little too strung-out for his liking, but genuine all the same. He presses his lips against her throat, delighting in the off-guard little hitch in her breath and _God,_ he should _not_ be this turned on and then suddenly Amy is talking again and he has to force himself to focus. “You know what I mean.”

He lets his hands wander up her sides, slowly dragging along her skin, like he’s re-learning all the curves he hasn’t explored in so long. Too long. When he reaches her face he lets his fingertips linger on her cheek for a moment before he tilts her face towards him, pressing his lips against hers.

“I missed you like this,” she whispers when he pulls away to lay another line of kisses down her neck, and he can hear the pleading in her voice because yes, it's 2 o'clock in the morning and he's maybe kind of giving her a hickey and pulling her (his) shirt up just a little too far for it to be just playful.

“You're right,” he murmurs, feeling a familiar shiver run through her. “I know _exactly_ what you mean.”

It’s strange, he realises later, that there’s still room for that kind of intimacy in the middle of the warzone their apartment seems to have become. But that’s the thing about this whole -- _thing,_ is that it’s not always yelling and screaming and slamming doors, sometimes it’s just a cancelled date night. Sometimes it’s an eye roll during what shouldn’t even _be_ an argument, but then that disregard is read the wrong way and the whole night dissolves into something ugly, and then suddenly their apartment isn’t warm and inviting anymore. It’s just a strange mix of microaggressions and misinterpretations, and neither of them know how it even started. Suddenly he’s angry all the time. It’s not even at her - it’s at himself, most of the time - it’s at the situation, the way things have changed, the distance they’ve let build up between them. He hates it.

And if he’s being honest, he does hate himself a little bit. And not in the normal, _30-years-of-abandonment-issues, uncomfortable-with-emotions_ kind of way. More in a _my-wife’s-career-has-progressed-and-changed-her-as-a-person, I’m-so-proud-of-her-really-and-I-love-her-so-much, but-she’s-different-and-I-want-her-back-oh-God-I-want-her-back_ kind of way.

* * *

 

Amy feels it too, in the way their apartment is the kind of silent it’s never been before.

It's quiet, too quiet - unconsciously, she shakes her head a little, trying to rid herself of the uncomfortably relevant cliché - and it dislodges something right down in her very core, because she _knows_ that ten years ago she would have killed for this kind of silence from him. She realises the irony of it all, that for all the time she spent trying to shut him up she should have just been _listening_ and now, now when they barely see each other and need to be taking full advantage of the time they have, now he has nothing to say to her.

She's fully aware that it's her fault. There's only so many times he can ask about her day and be content with the one word answers he receives in response. She doesn't blame him for reaching a level of frustration where he no longer sees the point in asking her about work, or about her cases, or about her new friends. There isn't a shred of doubt in her mind that he still _thinks_ about asking. She can see the mechanics of his mind whirring about inside his skull every time he looks at her, and it's with a rapt kind of attention - mixed with an undeniable degree of detachment - that she watches him attempting to build up the courage to talk to her. He very rarely does.

It's the most unsettling thing of all, maybe, at least in her mind. This is _Jake Peralta_ she's talking about, Jake Peralta who always has the words to soothe her anxiety, Jake Peralta who always knows the right moment to crack a stupid joke and make her smile, Jake Peralta who after twelve years of partnership and three years of _marriage, God dammit,_ can't find anything to say to her.

What's even more frustrating is the way he still manages to frustrate her without even trying. It feels like ages ago, like way back when in the early days of their partnership. He used to be able to irritate her with a look. It's almost the same, except this time there's no promise of a future of friendship, no underlying trust underneath all that banter and bravado. The weight of the realisation manifests in her shoulders, making them sag underneath the pressure of the decision she can feel looming in the distance. She's so _angry,_ Jesus, because she wants to talk to him but he never talks to her and when he _does_ talk to her she has nothing to say, just wants him to stop with all the incessant questions, and when he _doesn't_ talk to her it unsettles something important right at the bottom of her chest and leaves her feeling hollow and unwanted and _angry,_ and the craziest fucking thing is that she doesn't _want_ to be angry at him, she wants to stop picking fights and getting defensive at every turn, she wants more than anything for things to go back to the way they were before any of this. 

In some strange extension of her claustrophobia, being in a room with Jake - just Jake, without any kind of buffer in the form of alcohol or lust or longing - has become suffocating in the worst way. It's _baffling_ to her, mind-boggling, really, truthfully, that they’ve gotten to this point. It is, somehow, worse than all those long separations. Because at least then he was gone - _actually_ gone - and it made sense for her to miss him, but nowadays she can stand next to him in the living room of their home and know that he's somewhere else, only he's not, really, because he's standing right in front of her and God dammit why does he feel so far away? It's infuriating and maddening because he's right there but he's not really _there_ and she wants her best friend back because she _loves_ him, oh God - she can actually feel herself battling to keep air in her lungs even thinking about it - she loves him so _much,_ loves him more than - loves him in a way she's never loved _anyone,_ loves him like she’ll never love anyone again, but -

_Irreconcilable differences._

The words are clinical and ring with an unsettling finality in her mind. They come to her unbidden and unwanted, but they come to her all the same. She pushes them away, tries to drown them under the waves of uncertainty that roll over her, faster and harder with each passing second. The words still refuse to sink, instead floating uncomfortably in the bottom of her chest, rattling around with each ragged inhale.

No matter how hard she tries to push the ugly thoughts away, everything about what they’ve become still bothers her. It bothers her that it bothers her. The worst part about it is that she should’ve seen it coming: how many stories has she heard about people falling out of love for the exact same reasons they fell in love in the first place? Suddenly she’s frustrated by all of the little things that didn’t used to bother her. His endearing stubbornness has become a refusal to compromise. His fun-loving banter has become public humiliation. His one track mind is now immaturity, his bad habits are money down the drain. His spontaneity is just reckless now. Irresponsible. Incompatible.

It’s terrifying, quite frankly, that now the only way she sees him is through such a negative lens. 

She tries to negotiate with her own mind. She tries and tries to reassure herself that all her frustration is coming from a good place, from wanting him to be _better_ , from wanting him to be _good._ For him. She wants him to progress - she has no problems imagining him in an FBI windbreaker - for the sake of his own career, his own life, not for hers. Not for the impact it has on hers. Right?

Right. But, as much as she hates to admit it, it does bother her when her higher-ups ask when her husband is going to take the sergeant’s exam and she has to reply that he isn’t.

It’s a niggling kind of annoyance that she hates herself for because she swore she would never try to change him, made so many promises that she loves him for who he is. And despite how much she loves him, she’s just… frustrated. It’s not his fault. But Amy’s mind has always been more about logic and less about love, and she can’t justify the distance that exists between them now. 

Their whole relationship has become a weird source of cognitive dissonance for her. She’s not a quitter by any means, so the thought of walking away kind of makes her weak at the knees. But the analytical side of her brain makes a fair point when it argues that _it’s ridiculous to stay in a relationship that’s making both parties unhappy._

She’s angry and confused and deeply, _deeply_ unhappy for reasons she can’t even explain. That’s just it; she can’t even articulate where these feelings are coming from, can’t even reconcile the brief interludes of closeness that punctuate all the fighting. She has no mode by which to explain how _strange_ it is that through the bloodshot eyes of 2am she loves him more than she can possibly understand, but by the next morning she wants nothing more than space.

Time has started to pass by without her even realising it. One moment she’s staring angrily at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, having just stepped out of her daily post-work shower, and the next she can hear Jake’s keys jingling in the front door. She balks at the thought of him finding out something is wrong, so she heads straight for the kitchen and busies herself with… something, she’s not even sure _what_ she’s doing, if she’s quite honest, just needs some kind of distraction so she won’t have to engage -

Jake is in her space all of a sudden, asking her something, some question about her day that she can't process over the low hum of anger that's reverberating around the deepest corners of her consciousness. “What?” she snaps, and he visibly recoils at her response.

“Sorry,” she exhales sharply, somewhat surprised by the rough edge in her own voice. His eyes are searching her face for something, like a crack in the facade, a chink in her armour, a hint of weakness he can use to get her to talk to him. In an instant, she shifts her face into a careful mask of impassiveness.

(The one window she can’t pull the curtain over is her eyes. Even if the rest of her is lying to him, he always sees right through her dishonesty after anything more than a moment of sustained eye contact. Needless to say, she refuses to meet his gaze.)

"Is something wrong?” He pauses, waiting for an impending explosion. “Anything you wanna talk about?" He asks, keeping his tone just level enough to keep the hesitation in his voice almost entirely hidden.

She hears him, hears the pleading in his voice, hears the underlying message: _please talk to me._ She wants to talk to him, more than anything in the world, but is he going to listen? _Actually_ listen, not just stare at her with wide wondering eyes and let another discussion devolve into something ugly? It won’t be a discussion, not at the end of it, and it shouldn’t be so difficult to have a conversation with him about something that impacts both of them. She looks up to meet his eyes - good _God_ , those eyes - and opens her mouth to speak before closing it again abruptly.

She does want to talk to about it. She wants to tell him everything.

"No," she says quietly, already feeling the veritable hurricane of regret swirling around in her stomach. "Not tonight."

He sighs, and the tension in his shoulders is visible when they briefly rise and fall with his sharp exhale. She raises her hand to reach out for him but he's already coming towards her, placing a resigned kiss on her forehead and muttering a quick goodnight as he heads for the bathroom. Her fingertips barely graze the skin of his arm as he walks past her, and the whole encounter leaves her feeling a strange kind of empty.

Jake walks numbly to the shower and turns the water up hot, _hot_ , so scalding that the steaming spray pounds redness into his skin within his first thirty seconds in the glass enclosure.

He doesn’t know what to say to her anymore (and for someone who _always_ has something to say, he’s considerably distressed by this), doesn’t know what else to do to try and relieve some of the stress she’s feeling. Whether it’s a case, or him, or the newfound stress of her duties as a lieutenant, or all of the above - he can’t pinpoint the cause of this sudden distance. He can’t even pinpoint when it _started_ , which is, he supposes, the most concerning part of it all.

He goes through the motions of his regular shower routine, ignoring the buzzing noise at the back of his mind. If he focuses hard enough he can hear it over the constant rumble of the water barrelling down against the back of his neck: _not tonight, not tonight means not now, not here, not ever, not you, not with you._

Whatever silent tears he might be crying get lost in the rush of steaming water. He can’t even tell if he’s crying. After all, crying would be too merciful; finally a release for all the pent up emotion of the past day (the past 6 months, the past 12 years). 

His despondent little reverie is interrupted by a sudden rush of memories. There were times when Amy’s bright, sparkling laughter would echo around the bathroom, little giggles bouncing off the walls as she pushed her way into the shower with him. _I’m just being environmentally conscious_ , she would tell him, hands landing firmly against his chest as he pulls her in closer, closer, never close enough -

He turns off the hot water, letting the cold wash over him for an instant. The contrast is so sharp and startling that he gasps audibly, the frigid water sending pinpricks of almost-pain along his skin, shocking him back into consciousness. Back to reality. He leaves the bathroom, not caring about the stray drops of water that hit the floor, and exits back out into the world of not-talking, back into the echoing silence of an empty apartment.

Amy is gone. She’s gone… somewhere. When ( _if,_ insists the seven year old in the back of his mind) she returns, he won’t ask where she’s been. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s here and she’s not, that he’s alone again, that he wants to do _something_ to fix this distance between them but doesn’t know how. 

Or maybe none of it matters. Maybe she’s not coming back - and his heart clenches at the thought, not at the thought of her being gone for good but at the thought that it’s even a _possibility_ \- but he’s starting to wonder what difference it would make. She’s been living in her own head for God knows how long now, and Jake has started to feel like she’s already gone.

It’s a deeply unsettling feeling, one that rolls over him in waves every time he looks at her (or, tonight, at the empty space in the kitchen she occupied an hour ago) and realises he might be losing her. _Losing her,_ god, what a ridiculous idea, he’s done that before - he knows exactly how it feels to be worlds away from her, is more than familiar with the longing that takes her place when she’s not with him. He wants to crawl out of his skin and shake himself at the thought, because he knows that this is much, much worse than the kind of _losing her_ he’s experienced before. They didn’t have a choice then. If he loses her now, it will be because she doesn’t want him anymore.

It’s a fact that terrifies him more than standing in a courtroom and being sentenced to a fifteen year separation.

That train of thought gives way to exhaustion in under a minute. He can feel fatigue seeping into his bones, so he types out a quick text to Amy before he heads to bed.

_door is unlocked_

He stares at the blinking cursor, knowing something is just a little bit off. He blinks, in time with the flashing little line. Backspaces. Erases the whole message. 

_I left the door unlocked_

Backspaces again, goes back to the original message. 

 _door is unlocked_  

Then, almost an afterthought:

_door is unlocked. love u_

He hits send with a resigned sigh, trying to ignore the guilt echoing like an alarm at the back of his mind, and resigns himself to sleep. He's still awake when Amy slinks in two hours later with the faintest hint of cigarette smoke clinging to her hair. When she lies down he walks his fingers slowly across the sheets between them, almost hesitantly reaching for her hand, only for her to meet him halfway and entwine their fingers on instinct.

He doesn’t even remember what they were fighting about.

Were they even fighting at all?

The only thing his sleep-deprived brain can process is the obnoxious ticking of Amy’s analog alarm clock (it’s plugged into the wall but it has a battery backup, because of course it does, which means that Jake has no hope of it spontaneously dying and leaving him peacefully alone with his insomnia) and how, even though her fingers are laced with his across the tiny chasm of distance between them, she’s never felt further away.

He likes to think that unfortunate reality hasn't changed anything between them, not really, because they still fall asleep holding hands and tell each other _I love you_ at the end of every day.

But. 

"Jake?" Amy's voice finds him through the darkness.  
  
He gives a small hum in response, eyes shut, focused on the way her wedding ring digs almost uncomfortably into his skin when she squeezes his hand. 

“Do things feel… Different?” Jake’s heart drops to his stomach when she pauses, and he can practically hear the wheels spinning and whirring in her mind as she debates what to say next. “With us?” 

He doesn't say anything. Whether it's because he's still processing her question (the gravity of its implications, the consequences of his answer, the weight of its meaning for them) or because he doesn't have the right - and he uses the term _right_ very loosely, because in this scenario the right answer is anything that isn't the devastating blow the truth will bring - answer for her, neither of them are sure. Amy turns away from him, and the hand that isn't clutching at his reaches up to swipe away tears that get lost in the silence.

Despite everything, Jake still has an intuitive response to knowing his partner is in tears. It's visceral and immediate, and he squeezes her hand without thinking. “Ames, no, please don't cry -”

She inhales sharply beside him, like she's fighting to keep breath in her lungs, and he's already rolled halfway towards her when she speaks again. “When did everything change?”

The words are broken and watery when they leave her, and it's at this moment he finally lets go of her hand in favour of turning towards her and pulling her in close, so close, like one embrace can erase all the distance that's built up between them. “Nothing has changed,” he says forcefully, voice a little over-loud in the near silence of their apartment. “I'm still in love with you, I still want to be with you, and I'm still going to fight for this - for _us_ \- for as long as you’ll let me, Amy, I promise you.”

“I know,” she starts, tears still obvious in her voice, and she still refuses to look at him. “I know, and I love you too, _so much,_ Jake, but -”

“Ames,” his voice is soft even when he interrupts her spiral. “I'm sorry that - I'm sorry things are different. We’re just… Out of sync, okay? We’ve just gotta get the balance back. We’ve done it before, remember?” She sighs deeply next to him, like she's trying to exhale all of her emotions in a single breath. The spiral is calming now, and she finally melts into his embrace. He holds her a little tighter where his arm is thrown over her waist and presses a row of kisses along her hairline, savouring the soft little hum she gives in response. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she finally turns to face him, curling further into his arms and pressing a quick kiss against his lips. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Jake falls asleep content with the closeness but his dreams are filled with questions and arguments, and he jolts awake at 2am. He glances down at Amy - soft, beautiful Amy, his partner, his _wife._  

_When did everything change?_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you sm for reading! Please please please send me some thoughts about this. Questions, qualms, queries, I'll take anything. If there's a particular line or section that punched you in the face, as it were, please let me know! 
> 
> Hit me up here or @santiagostyle on tumblr x


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